Marketing Health: Smoking and the Discourse of Public Health in Britain, 1945-2000

Virginia Berridge

Abstract

This book deals with changes in outlook of public health after the Second World War. Focussing on services, vaccination, and dealing with health issues at the local level, it can be seen that public health developed a new discourse post war. Centring on chronic disease, it became concerned with the concept of ‘risk’ and targeted individual behaviour. The mass media and centralized campaigning directed at the whole population replaced local campaigns. Politicians' early worries about the ‘nanny state’ gave way to a desire to inculcate new norms of behaviour. How change was to be achieved became ... More

This book deals with changes in outlook of public health after the Second World War. Focussing on services, vaccination, and dealing with health issues at the local level, it can be seen that public health developed a new discourse post war. Centring on chronic disease, it became concerned with the concept of ‘risk’ and targeted individual behaviour. The mass media and centralized campaigning directed at the whole population replaced local campaigns. Politicians' early worries about the ‘nanny state’ gave way to a desire to inculcate new norms of behaviour. How change was to be achieved became a matter of much debate. Identifying debates between those believing in ‘systematic gradualism’ and those who advocated a more coercive approach, this book uses smoking as a model. Such debates brought into play tensions over the relationships between public health and industrial interests. Health campaigning by new style pressure groups like ASH, which were part state funded, was an important motive force behind the change. In the 1980s and 1990s, public health changed again. Passive smoking and HIV/AIDS brought environmental concerns back into public health, which had disappeared after the 1950s. The ‘rise of addiction’ for smoking demonstrated the power of pharmaceutical interests to define a new ‘pharmaceutical public health’, in which treatment and ‘magic bullets’ were also tactics for prevention. In the early 21st century, public health was to play to complex tensions and conflicting impetuses. This book shows that those tensions were nothing new and outlines their development over the last half century.

End Matter

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